Tor launches its first crowdfunding campaign as it seeks to be less reliant on US government funds
With US government as top donor, Tor Project looks to crowdfunding — Following up on goals set earlier this year, the Tor Project launched its first crowdfunding project today to expand …
Context & Ripple Effects
By late 2015, the Tor Project's largest donor was the US government itself — an awkward position for anonymity software whose users often need protection from state surveillance. The campaign follows a year of retrenchment: months earlier the project had shut down Tor Cloud, ending the EC2-powered service that let volunteers donate bandwidth.
Executive director Shari Steele has since framed diversifying funding sources and repairing public perception as core priorities, alongside security fixes like the HackerOne bug bounty. The crowdfunding drive is the first concrete step on the money side.
First-order effects
- The Tor Project gains a new revenue stream from individual supporters, directly chipping away at its dependence on the US government as top donor — and the campaign's follow-up coverage shows it delivered, raising over $200,000 by January 2016 (the final tally).
Second-order effects
- Diversification proves partial: within weeks Tor launched a bug bounty program with HackerOne that was itself sponsored by the Open Technology Fund, showing government-linked money remains woven into the project's security operations even as it courts small donors.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, privacy infrastructure nonprofits move from grant-dependent to mixed-funding models — where a broad base of small donors buys independence of mission, but institutional sponsors still underwrite expensive work like security audits, forcing each organization to balance the two.
The trend: Privacy and censorship-circumvention nonprofits are shifting from single-government patronage toward diversified community-funded models, with institutional grants increasingly reserved for targeted programs rather than core operations.